Trio uses RTI for extortion, held

Times of India: Lucknow: Saturday, 09 August 2014.

A gang of three was caught near Bapu Bhawan for extorting money from the chief medical officer of Banda. During investigation, it came to light that the trio had been using a unique modus operandi to extort money from government employees for over fifteen years.

ASP crime branch Dinesh Kumar Singh said, "Kamlesh Sharma Bhatt of Faizabad and his two aides Chanchal Bhatt, a tempo driver, and Praveen Singh, a BCom student of Kanpur University used RTI to gather information about several government projects, departments and the officials concerned. After a thorough research, they identified lacunae in the projects, targeted the officials concerned, and asked them to pay extortion money or face grave consequences."

"To prevent the revelations and potential complications, many senior officials, including several CMOs, CMS, DSO, excise duty officer, BSA and RTO gave money to them," he said.

A similar trick was also used in the case of Dr RK Singh, who is a CMO posted in Banda and was phoned to pay Rs 25,000 to avoid stringent action for a corruption complaint. However, since Dr Singh had no case of corruption against him, he contacted the police and a team was sent in plain clothes to Hazratganj, where the trio had asked Dr Singh to come with the money, said Singh.

During interrogation, Kamlesh admitted to have been involved in several cases of extortion for more than a decade and said he used new SIM cards every time. His first victim was a PWD engineer, from whom he took Rs 10,000, when he found that the engineer was allegedly using bad quality of material in road construction. "Although he is only high school pass, his confidence level is such that he calls government employees ?the biggest cowards' as they were always involved in some form of corruption," said Singh.

"Both his aides were given 10% commission in each extortion," he added.

Three directories of UP, MP and Delhi containing numbers of government employees were recovered from them, police said. A case was registered against the accused under IPC sections 384 and 392.